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Toast

The Theatre Producer is terrified of spiders. Not, probably wouldn’t go on a family holiday with them, or given a choice wouldn’t hang out with them. She is ‘OMG DO NOT WANT’ scared of spiders. Like proper terror.

There was one in the Xbox room a few weeks ago, Biscuit pointed it out and she ran away and hid in the bathroom until I threw the very confused spider into the garden.

She was not amused.

This made me formulate a plan, if I need to post something on the blog that I don’t want her to read, I just have to post it with a picture of a spider and she won’t be able to see it because it will be too scary.

Yes she really is that scared of spiders.

The only flaw in this plan is if you lot (the Internets) tell her what the post is about. So what do you say Internets? Can you keep a secret?

Toast

I don’t go on holiday with girls. I’ve tried it a few times and it’s never gone well.

Ladies, for all their lovely properties have a very different view on holiday time, also the ones I know seem to turn into despots once they pass through customs.

Here are some previous examples of holiday disasters

Ibiza

Between the tickets being booked and me going, the girl and I split up (it was more of a fling than a relationship). She begged me to go anyway. I arrived at the airport with no-idea of where I was staying and no way of contacting her.

I managed to get hold of someone else in the group and told her I had arrived. They picked me up, not her, two complete strangers. She didn’t bother going in the car so I had a weird, very long trip to the house with two people I’d never met before.

The car ride was weird but nothing compared to spending time in a remote villa with her sisters and all her friends. I was the odd one out while they were off their tits on drugs. I was only there for a few days but it felt like months, long awkward months of watch my ex-not-quite-girlfriend flirt with a someone else in the pool.

There was a sauna though, which was nice.

Italy

I was invited by a flatmate. 10 of us went to a remote farm house in the middle of no-where. (I’m sensing a theme) There was one car, the girl was the only driver registered on it. She spent the whole holiday being either 1) too tired to drive 2) drunk.

Nine People went a bit mad from being stranded until we managed to rent a car from a man in a farm house and we had one lovely day of exploring and doing touristy stuff before we left. When we got back it was my fault that people get pestering her to drive.

Wales

It was a trip my a girlfriend of the time. It was fine at first and then I wanted to read a book for an hour on the Sunday, I know the heartless bastard. This caused a furious rage that lasted the rest of the evening, and the journey home all the way to Euston.

She stormed off into the underground, I got involved in a fight (well trying to break one up) but she didn’t notice because she was so angry. I didn’t get home until midnight, because of all the police stuff and she was still angry with me for the next week. The book turned out to be rubbish too.

The reason I mention this is that the Theatre Producer invited me on holiday with her, a mini-break really, to go to the wedding of her friend in Serbia.

Toast

Today was a big day in relationship terms. I gave the Theatre Producer a drawer, well the use of a drawer in my room.

She now has her own storage device in my home. This is a big step for me, letting a girl (who are rubbish as we all know*) have her own storage place in my room (which is excellent).

The drawer was empty at first, she was slightly taken aback with the offering. Then it had some make-up in it. Now it is filled with strange lady things like moisturiser, well it was last time I saw into it**.

Now I am afeared to look inside. It is a place of womanly things and not for me.

Where will this end? I do not know, maybe if she is really good I’ll let use my bestest crayons to draw pictures of dragons.

*All girls are rubbish, this isn’t a slight on the Theatre Producer it’s just that all ladies smell weird and they don’t like robots enough.

**She opened it when I was in the room. There might have been some frilly things in it.

Toast

Big News! Jen is moving into the house with Biscuit and I! Shocking eh?

Well it’s not forever, just for a couple of weeks in-between moving up to London. She has to wait a couple of weeks for her new place to become available and the lease on her current place expires before then.

Biscuit had a chat with me about it to see if I was fine with it. Of course I was, but I thought it would be excellent opportunity to set Jen some tasks on a condition of her moving in.

So far I have

1) Defeat The Theatre producer at a 3D computer game
Something shooty, she hasn’t got her head around modern 3d games yet so she can’t play Biscuit’s beloved Borderlands with him

2) Make us a piePies are excellent

3) Force Biscuit to update the blog more often
Although since she doesn’t know about the blog I’m not sure how I’ll organise that one.

Toast

I’ve got a male chum who has just come out of a long relationship. He was going out with this girl for about five years, they were living together and now it’s over.

He seems fine about the whole thing. They were one of those couples that snipe at each other all the time. He finally broke it off after yet another huge fight. It was coming for a long time.

Anyway. He is back to being single and is determined to stay out of a relationship for a while, which is why he has instigated The Eight Sexings Rule*.

The Eight Sexing Rule

My chum, let’s call him Geoff, is only going to have sex with any girl a maximum of eight times. He has decided this is the point when things start to get a bit like a relationship and so any more could be dangerous.

An evening of nude fun counts as one sexing and if something in the morning happens, well that doesn’t count as a new one either. So it’s probably more eight sex-dates rather than sex eight times. I know this because all his friends have been quizzing him on the rules after he made such a bold statement.

It is working out for him so far. He is dating a few ladies but keeping them at a distance and building up what he calls ‘a rota’. Or as I like to call it ‘a tragedy waiting to happen’.

Toast

Things have been going well with The Theatre Producer. So well that finding something interesting to say is a struggle. ‘We did this and it was lovely’ doesn’t make a good read. So I thought now would be a good time to revisit some dating disasters, namely The Columbian.

Setting the scene

It was around 2007 when we met. I was working at a rather silly magazine and living in North West London, near Hampstead Heath. Only six months previously my father had got in contact with me after years apart to let me know he had cancer and it wasn’t looking good.

Our first date

I was dating girls on MySingleFriend. A slightly grumpy but very pretty looking girl contacted me. She had really long black hair and was from Columbia. She listed that she smoked in her profile so I was a bit casual about the whole thing but she did appear to live only a couple of streets away so we met up for a date.

Our first date was a meal and then a walk on the Heath. It was pleasant.

She did something complicated in the city, she had come over to England when she was very young. So she remembered Columbia but had spent most of her life in London.

Her accent was interesting, sort of softly melodic. She was very pretty, tall and a brunette so well it was basically much all my weaknesses in one. After the walk on the heath we strolled into town stopping in bars on the way. We got quite drunk.

We had a few more dates after that. We went out for a lot of meals. They went well. So well that I sat her down and had a bit of a chat about the situation with my father. I felt it was important to let her know that there was some stuff going on.

On our fifth date I cooked for her. She liked my cooking and she stayed the night in my tiny single bed while my flatmate played loud punk music in the next room. I can remember that her thick black hair fell down to her waist. It made her look amazingly exotic.

We carried on dating. I was made redundant from my job which was a shock but also the right thing. On the day I was made redundant I had typed up my letter of resignation and put it on the desk of my boss. He called me into a meeting before reading it so I had to steal it back and got to leave anyway but with redundancy pay. Win.

I went freelance for a while. Freelance journalism is tough, especially when you are just starting out. Luckily I had a very good friend who gave me some names and helped me get going. She gave me three names to contact and pitch ideas too. Two of them became semi regular work and I was away.

I ended up house-and-dog sitting for a chum. I invited the Columbian to help me house sit for a week. It was fun and a way of testing if we could live together.

We got on great, although the dog got really angry if we touched each other in front of him. My Father took a turn for the worst and so we went to go and see him. It was a long exhausting drive but it was good to see him and after years of not talking we’d even sort of become close. It was also nice that she got meet my father.

Moving in

The Columbian and I carried on dating, as in a proper relationship. I visited her extended family in South London a lot. This would involve dancing. There was always salsa dancing and the English boys (the women seemed to exclusively date English boys) would be taught how to dance in front of the whole family. It was quite embarrassing trying to clonk your way through dance steps while 30-40 professional dancers watched you and talked about your form but I did it because it was a relationship and that’s what you do.

A few months passed, she was looking for somewhere to live. I was sort of looking and a friend of mine who had a lovely place that he got for a steal was moving to Dubai. We decided to move in together.

The flat was tiny but perfect in a lovely part of town. Moving in was exciting. We had loads of some things (mostly clothes) and almost nothing of others (cooking equipment) for a while it was brilliant, if very expensive.

I would work from home writing and pitching ideas and then I’d cook an evening meal so she had something lovely to eat when she got back. I’d also make her coffee in the mornings while she was in the shower. She was very particular about her coffee so would be surprisingly angry if it wasn’t milky enough.

She started to get angry a lot. I was earning a reasonable wage, enough to cover the rent food and the occasional present for her but not as much as she did. Someone she worked with, a man, was starting to make her feel bad about going out with someone who earned less than she did and she’d sometimes return home so angry that even posh chocolate milk couldn’t cheer her up.

Bad news

My father passed away. He suddenly got a lot worse and then was gone. It happened in 48 hours. The funeral was rushed and his second wife wrote me and my siblings out of his history. We sat in the front row and listened as the man doing the ceremony talked about our dad but neglected to mention his children. It was a tough time.

The next day I pitched for a book and got my first book deal. I didn’t mope around or anything like that, I threw myself into my work for the next few weeks.

Birthday fun

My birthday came around. I got given money by my mum for a lovely coat that I had lusted after for years. I spent it on our gas bill. My birthday came and we went out and she got me a kebab, and I paid for us to go to the cinema. She didn’t give me a card but I didn’t want to make a thing out of it so didn’t say anything.

The next day she returned from work laden down with presents. Huge bags full of gift-wrapped boxes. I was shivering with excitement but waited a few hours before politely enquiring if they were for me. She said no, she’d got them for her aunts to cheer them up. I ask if she’d got me a card, she said she had but that she hadn’t given it to me because I was acting weird and didn’t deserve it.

A few days later she came back from work and said ‘I was talking to my friend at work, he says a parent dying isn’t such a big deal and you should just get over it’.

It was such a horrible thing to say I didn’t even know how to react. I walked out to cool off. Forgetting my wallet, phone or coat. So I just stood by some bins shivering in the rain until I came back. She started sleeping on the sofa some nights but wouldn’t explain why.

What makes a date?

The guy at work who had been pouring poison in her ear asked her out on a date. Well she said it wasn’t a date but they went to Notting Hill for the day to go to the market and then for a meal. Inside I was uncomfortable but didn’t make anything out of it. She was the only girl to ever meet my dad and that meant something to me in a weird sort of way.

We had a pregnancy scare. She didn’t read the instructions for the pill and so we had a very tense evening with those little tests with thankfully turned out to be a false alarm. I tried to remain calm during the whole episode which she would later list as a reason she broke-up with me.

A friend of hers came down to stay, and spent the whole time being deeply unreasonable. She would fly into a furious rage with her boyfriend (also staying) over nothing and then stomp around for the rest of the day. The Columbian was confused by this behaviour and was not amused when I mentioned that she acted a bit like that sometimes.

I had a big weekend of work. I had to review a night club, go on a stand-up course for a feature and then re-write 3000 words on poker. I warned her that I would be chained to my desk so she went out with her friend and her boyfriend.

After the club night I was home for 20 minutes before I had to shower and go to the stand-up course. I did the course, and my first ever stand-up performance, wrote the words and then on the Monday she said ‘we need to talk.’

I knew what was coming and I had decided it was for the best.

If I gave in again I’d spend the rest of my life being mentally badgered by her. So we broke-up. If anything it was quite amicable. I asked if I could have the flat for a week to finish a book and she said yes and stayed with her parents who had a spare flat nearby.

I ate some bad mushrooms and so was violently ill for a few days and then got stuck into the book. We were still Facebook friends so I got to experience her joyous Facebook updates about being back on the dating scene until I did the right thing and un-friended her.

She counter-acted by writing a long email to my mum listing everything that was wrong with me.

A week or so later I moved out to a friends house and resolved to have nothing to do with her any more, apart from getting my half of the deposit on the flat back. That took six months and involved several emails from her saying she wanted to get back together.

Biscuit

Bank holiday Monday, Jen suggested that we go to Thorpe Park. We set of from hers early(ish) in the mornin after she had cooked me excellent eggy bread for breakfast. The journey provided an amusing insight into girl logic.

We were angling to get there just as it opened so left fairly early on Jen’s promise that it was only 20 minutes away. She needed to stop off at the start of the journey so she could grab some fags and cash so pulled into a garage before hitting the motorway. She was also low on fuel but decided not to get any. Obviously any man would think ‘need fuel… tank empty… buy now’, but this is a not man logic.

5 minutes down the motorway she decided that we needed fuel so took a 10 minute diversion to find a garage. I was incredulous! Proper open-mouthed amazement! Thankfully it’s charmingly mental so I’ve just filed it under ‘endearing idiosyncrasy’

An hour after setting off, we arrived at Thorpe Park and set about the serious business of riding roller-coasters! If it was a game we would have won a gold medal at it. We made the front of ALL the roller-coasters with impressive efficiency. There was a lot of pulling fierce animal faces for the cameras so I bought her a fridge magnet of our speed face-lifts as a memento.

All the spare moments between making ourselves dizzy in the rides we spent stuffing food into our face holes. Foolishly we left the Tidal Wave until dark clouds had covered the sun and a chilly breeze picked up. As you may guess from its name, the tidal wave makes you wet. Very wet. In retrospect I’m not sure why I thought otherwise.

The force of the water when we splashed down was so strong it took Jen’s sunglasses off her head, which meant I leapt head-first back into the car after everyone had got off and fished around in the footwell until I found them floating.

I may not be able to conquer citadels for her, or name a new species of flower after her, but I can fish around in murky water for her much loved floral sunglasses and that makes her happy.

Being wet on a cold day can put a bit of a dampener on things (literally) so we decided to call it a day and retire to the warmth of the overpriced coffee bar for steaming hot chocolate. Even when she’s half drowned I still fancy her. Even when she banged her head in her car door after calling me a retard, I still fancy her.

Marriage percentage: 70% – She loves riding the front of rollercoasters AND stuffing her face all day long. I can see this being a very fruitful partnership.